Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 415
of so many hillsides by chestnut woods is not a product of neglect or abandon-
ment. On the contrary, it is a result of the careful management of woods and
trees, an aspect of that humanized but still not human landscape so typical of
post-imperial Italy.
The contraction of the late Roman state and of the agricultural land use
it fostered and the retrenchment of populations that made labour-intensive
cultivation unsustainable, created an opportunity for this kind of woodland.
Chestnut woods generated abundant useful things (food, forage, fuel) with-
out demanding intensive work in return. This kind of woodland was perfectly
attuned to the demographic and social conditions of the time. In Campania
as in Lombardy forests of Castanea represented the early medieval human-
ized, but not fully anthropomorphized, landscape of a lightly settled Italy.
Thus, the peculiarities of late antique Italians’ ecological footprinting released
the potential of Castanea sativa and launched the peninsular success of
this species.
Conclusion
In a remarkable New York Times bestseller, Alan Wiesman attempted to cal-
culate the impact of radical depopulation on humanized landscapes, urban
and rural.101 His results were appropriately sensational and explain the book’s
sales (so does the fluent writing). To figure out what Manhattan might look like
half a century after its inhabitants had abandoned it, Wiesman visited some
unnaturally de-humanized corners of the 21st-century world: the area around
Chernobyl, the no-man’s land between Turkish and Greek portions of Cyprus,
and the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. Wiesman found
nature’s astonishing resilience and the shockingly short resistance of human
artifacts left to their own devices. A human generation is enough to reduce to
overgrown rubble a 1970s hotel or to return rare birds to river estuaries once
rendered toxic by people. For students of late antique Italy, Wiesman’s book is
a nice reminder that however ‘re-natured’ or ‘decolonized’ post-classical land-
scapes were, and despite the rhetoric of 5th- and 6th-century authors, they
were not abandoned like some Ukrainian, Cypriot, or Korean spaces have been
lately: so the post-classical archaeological remains suggest.102 To maintain
the landscape of fields, ditches, riverbanks, roads, roofed buildings, terraces,
101 Wiesman, The World Without Us.
102 Hoffmann, Environmental History, p. 61 applies the concepts re-naturalization and decol-
onization to Late Antiquity.